I’ve decided to get a blog going and keep everybody up to date on the goings-on with myself from a training and racing point of view. I look forward to it being a means for me to communicate with fellow athletes and share training advice too, so here goes…

So as the coaching is starting to settle down a bit leading into the festive season, I’ve found myself with some time to think…What are my own personal goals for 2016? What races am I going to target? Should I be brave and go big, or should I sink into the crowd and stay within myself?

I was really eyeing up the idea of doing Durban Ironman 70.3, as I have family there, and it’s Durban, and it’s a fast flat 70.3, something I’ve never done. Although, with the race’s future on an apparent knife edge, it seems unrealistic to bank on it happening. So that leaves me with the idea of perhaps doing IronmanSA – Ja, that’s the full thing, where you do insane distances in three different disciplines one after the other…about that going big thing 😐 It makes sense to me. I don’t feel intimidate by any of the three disciplines and I feel that I have now aged enough, and most importantly, I am back to a good state of health. So that’s the plan, and I’m keen to give Xterra Grabouw a shot on the way, that’ll get me mixing up the training on the trails.

With that in mind, what will I be doing over the festive season? Eating too much food, sure, but I’m going to need to bank some training. I spent the majority of winter just running, leading up to CT Marathon, so over December the focus will be on swimming and cycling. I need to get comfy with sitting on my TT bike, in the TT position for hours on end. I need to fine tune my nutrition. I got my nutrition wrong at DC – I need to use more gels and bars and a little less of the baby potatoes. I miss being a cyclist to a degree, or at least I miss where my cycling was when I only had to think about riding a bike. Then, I will look to increase my running from the beginning of January. So that’s me in a nutshell over the holidays. What are your goals? Any advice for me as I head into the unknown?